Same underlying tool, two possible markets. The narrow one is around 900 companies in a specific regulated niche who would plausibly pay $200/month. The wide one is maybe 40,000 individuals who would pay $9.
I have 10 hours a week, no sales experience, and a moderate fear of phone calls. Both numbers look fine on a spreadsheet, which is exactly why I do not trust the spreadsheet.
900 at $200, and the reason is that 900 is a countable number.
You can build a list of all 900 in a week. You can email every one of them personally over a quarter. You need 12 to clear $2,400 MRR, and 12 is a number you can picture. The whole business fits in a spreadsheet you can actually read.
The 40,000 at $9 is not a market you can reach with 10 hours a week - it is a market you reach with content, SEO, ads and a funnel, all of which are full-time jobs and none of which you are currently doing. You would need 270 customers for the same revenue, at a price point that supports zero human contact.
The honest cost of the narrow one: sales cycles in regulated niches are long, procurement is real, and someone will ask for a security questionnaire. If that sounds worse to you than writing blog posts for two years, that preference is legitimate data.
And 12 is small enough that you will know each of them by name, which means your churn problem for the first two years is a relationship problem rather than a metrics problem. That is much easier with 10 hours a week.
"You need 12" reframed the whole thing. I had been comparing 900 to 40,000 rather than 12 to 270.
Partly disagree - you asked which to probe first, and the two probes cost wildly different amounts.
The $9 market is testable in a weekend: page, ads, count. The $200 market is testable in about six weeks of calls before you learn anything real, because nobody in a regulated niche buys from a landing page.
So if the question is "where do I spend the next 10 hours", run the cheap test first, purely to learn how people describe the problem in their own words. Then take that language into the narrow market where the money is. The wide test is market research for the narrow launch.
That is fair and I would take it further - the vocabulary is the real output of the cheap test. The words a solo user uses for the problem are usually the words the buyer at the 900 companies uses too, and getting those right is most of what makes cold email work.
Churn maths is the part the spreadsheet hides. $9 individuals churn at 6-8% monthly and you are refilling a leaking bucket forever. $200 companies churn at 1-2% annually once they have put your tool in a process. Same revenue, completely different amount of running to stand still.
"Moderate fear of phone calls" is going to decide this whether you plan for it or not. You can do the narrow market entirely over email and async demos - plenty do - but if you avoid the calls and avoid the content treadmill, neither market works. Pick the discomfort you will actually tolerate on a Tuesday night.
Regulated niche of 900 also means they all know each other, which cuts both ways harder than people expect.
@interval_ida · 9mo ago
Before either: can you actually produce the list of 900? Sit down for two hours and try to write down 50 by name. If you can, the market is reachable and the plan works. If you get to 11 and start guessing, the 900 is a market-sizing fantasy from an industry report and everything downstream of it is fiction.
This is the cheapest test in this whole thread and almost nobody runs it.
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